Ross Douthat

Thoughts on the Boston Lockdown

By ROSS DOUTHAT

April 22, 2013

For about thirty minutes late on Friday, during a slightly shamefaced press conference announcing that the authorities had shut down all of Boston to catch a teenage fugitive and then failed to catch him, it looked like there might be a modest media backlash against the decision to put an entire American metropolis on lockdown to hunt a single bomber. But then Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was spotted in a backyard boat, the police and Feds accepted the applause of a grateful city, and the conversation turned swiftly to Miranda rights, radical Islam, and how the press covered the whole grisly affair.

But the question lingers: Was the lockdown actually a good idea? Or, as Ha’aretz columnist Chemi Salev argued last week, did it hand the Boston terrorists, and terrorism more generally, an undeserved victory? Here’s his case:

Never, in the history of violence aimed at innocent civilians, have the lives of so many been disrupted so much by the relatively amateurish actions of so few.

More than a million people cowered in their homes on Friday, under curfew, gripped by fear. The U.S. army and other security forces invaded and occupied an American town. Helicopters, armored vehicles, soldiers in full battle gear and crack SWAT teams sealed off streets and conducted house-to-house searches.

… Of course, the killing of three precious people and the injury of dozens of others are a painful tragedy and an unforgiveable crime…. [But] this was not 9/11, the Bombay bombings or the Beslan slaughter of children, also carried out by Chechen terrorists. It wasn’t the Bali nightclub bombings, the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie or the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma. And it didn’t come close even to the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium carnage, the killing of students in Maalot or the murder of 39 Palestinians in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

Therefore, in terms of cost-benefit analysis, from the evil terrorist’s point of view, the Boylston Street bombings and their after aftermath can only be viewed as a resounding triumph. If the primary goal of terror attacks is to instill fear and intimidate people, to influence governments and to attract world attention, then the Boston bombers have probably succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

I’m sympathetic to this argument, but let me make one possible case against Salev’s point. So far as we can tell, the brothers Tsarnaev were not necessarily hardened fanatics steeled for martyrdom: They seem to have actually believed that they could just return to their normal lives after dropping off a couple of pressure-cooker bombs near the Boston Marathon finish line; once they were identified their attempts at escape betrayed panic and desperation more than suicidal resignation; and the younger brother clearly chose flight and then surrender rather than a guns-blazing suicide by cop. They conducted themselves, in other words, like people who didn’t necessarily want to get caught — which suggests that at some level they might have been deterrable, if only they had understood just how impossible it would be to walk away from what happened on Monday.

If that’s the case, and if we assume there are other young men like these brothers floating on the fringes of terrorland – slightly dim bulbs who might persuade themselves that they can play terrorist without facing the consequences — there’s something to be said for the message that the Boston lockdown sent to them: If you perpetrate an act like this, you will not escape, you will not disappear, you will not enjoy even 24 hours as a symbol of resistance to the Great Satan. You will be caught, and quickly, because we will move mountains to catch you, up to and including shutting down an entire city to ensure that you stay cornered.

The point of this kind of message is not to deter, say, the next Mohammed Atta. Rather, it’s to shrink the pool of amateurs, dilettantes and potential freelancers by establishing an almost crazy-seeming level of American anti-terror resolve.

But of course a strategy like this only works until it doesn’t. When terror is out-of-the-ordinary, you can afford an extraordinary response; if it’s more common, moving heaven and earth gets self-defeating and even disastrous in a hurry. In this sense, the Boston lockdown was a luxury made possible by the phenomenon I wrote about last week — the surprisingly low rate of terror attacks in the 21st century United States. Because the Marathon bombing was such an unusual event, the city of Boston could muster a sweeping, almost crazy-seeming response without worrying that it would find itself having to do exactly the same thing six months later. But if such attacks started happening more frequently, as they obviously very well could, then last Friday’s precedent would put public officials across the country in an extremely uncomfortable bind: Repeatedly reproducing the lockdown might seem like a non-starter, yet not matching what Boston did would open you up to all kinds of scapegoating if, say, an on-the-loose bomber struck again.

This bind is part of why I’m not quite as sanguine about the ripple effects of the lockdown as Megan McArdle is here:

Many progressives, and especially, many libertarians, are criticizing this as an overreaction that involved immense intrusions into personal liberty. An overreaction it may have been, but I’m less worried about the liberty aspect, because as far as I can tell, compliance with the shutdown was pretty much entirely voluntary. I haven’t seen any complaints about jackbooted police officers forcing people back into their homes when they tried to come out, and I have heard reports from folks who drove into the office without getting hassled. I’d imagine that most people were quite willing to stay inside for a day if that would help the police capture the marathon bombers.

… I’m actually less worried about this sort of large-scale operation than I am about smaller, more pervasive erosions of civil liberties, like airport security, theaters, and warrantless wiretapping. When it comes to shutting down a city, it’s very unlikely that we’re going to make a habit of this sort of thing: it’s immensely costly for the government, somewhat costly to the economy, and except in very extraordinary instances, people don’t like it. On the other hand, stop-and-frisk became widespread, and not-infrequently abusive, precisely because it’s invisible to most voters. We should be worried about the seizure of our liberty in small, manageable doses, not enormous chunks.

I agree that we aren’t likely to make a habit of it endlessly. But the pressure to do absolutely everything to stop a terrorist, and the sense in many quarters that the Boston lockdown “worked,” seems like it might inspire some genuine fiascos in a world where we suddenly had to adjust to a more frequent drumbeat of attacks. (It doesn’t take jackboots for an armed house-to-house search to go badly awry.) And yes, I too worry more about the encroachments of security theater than the threat of a police state — but the problem with flirting with the police state approach, even in a voluntary, only-for-a-day way, is that it makes those “small, manageable” encroachments seem, well, smaller and more manageable, and therefore harder to resist.